The rollicking tale of a first-of-its-kind adventure—driving a Tesla through Central America. Only a week after the nation’s newspapers were filled with headlines of the first cross-country trip in an electric car, two Louisianans slip quietly across the Rio Grande in south Texas in an attempt to do the unthinkable—drive a factory electric car across seven Third World countries to the “end of the road,” Panama City, Panama. Without support and armed only with a toolbox, a bag of electrical adapters, and their wits, author Randy Denmon and his friend Dean trudge on through jungles, deserts, volcanoes, rivers, and crater-sized potholes, all the while trying to avoid the drug cartels and corrupt border guards that could mean a quick end to their adventure . . . and their lives. Through it all, the same enormous problem loomed daily: how to charge the car in such a primitive and desolate setting? Despite the numerous setbacks, Randy never lost his sense of humor. Off the Grid is as much a spiritual journey as a physical one about two guys who dropped everything for one grand twenty-first-century adventure—traveling back in time in a car that seemed to come from the future.

An Ugly Place To Die There's nothing pretty about Mexico in 1914. On the verge of a bloody civil war that's spiraling out of control, it's no place for hotheads or weak hearts--a place where only real men survive. . .if they're lucky. As an officer for the U.S. War Department, Myles Adams knows all about keeping a cool head. And he's just the man who can help his former partner-in-arms Stewart Cook rescue his soon-to-be fiancée, Alexia Garcia, from the rebel forces. But this is a country where a man would shoot you as soon as look at you. . . An Even Uglier Place To Live. . . With Alexia safe in hand, the two Americans find themselves in even greater danger. On the run from Jorge Trevino, a ruthless bandito who would kill to have what Myles has--namely the gorgeous Carmen Cologan--these men are about to witness all the horrors that the Mexican frontier has to offer--war, poverty, and human suffering too agonizing to be believed. They'll have to use every drop of courage they have to survive, but in a land with no law and order, sometimes a man has to kill to stay alive. . . "A classic adventure. . .riveting!" --Richard S. Wheeler, Spur Winning author of Vengeance Valley

"The Savage Breed unfolds with a rush in a time and place rarely visited by the average Western writer. Randy Denmon takes the reader down a suspenseful trail to a near forgotten period in this rousing story of war, love and revenge." --True West Magazine Across The River. . .And Into Hell Travis Ross and Chase McAlister were infamous Indian hunters, scouts and Texas Rangers turned ranchers. In a war of independence, they fought against desperate odds. Travis lost a woman, the daughter of a proud Mexican rancher, and both made the kind of enemies that never go away. Now, a new war is brewing and the two friends are looking across the Rio Grande, knowing what they left behind, facing a chance to settle scores, recapture what they lost, and many more ways to die. . . A decade after they fought for Texas, Travis and Chase plunge into the brutal madness of the Mexican American War. And amidst the fighting and suffering, they discover how much has changed, what has stayed the same, and that in a furious fight for survival, they've made the most dangerous enemy of all. . .a murderer fighting on their own side. . . "An impressive debut--a colorful, action-filled novel." --Elmer Kelton, five-time Spur Winner on The Lawless Frontier

A Reference Guide to Verbal Sparring, Comebacks, Irony, Insults, and So Much More

Author: Lawrence Dorfman

Publisher: Skyhorse

ISBN: 1632201291

Category: Humor

Page: 288

View: 8329

The lord of snark, Lawrence Dorfman, is back! With this treasury of backhanded compliments, sarcastic insults, and catty comebacks, Dorfman gives us transformative wisdom that’s sure to change your life?or at least induce a light chuckle. One question plagues us all: How do we survive all the Sturm und Drang of everyday life? The answer is but one word: snark. "She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on by a pitchfork.” —Jonathan Swift "Why don’t you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.” —P. G. Wodehouse "He’s a mental midget with the IQ of a fence post.” —Tom Waits "They hardly make ’em like him anymore?but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.” —Hunter S. Thompson "He has a Teflon brain . . . nothing sticks” —Lily Tomlin "He has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” —Theodore Roosevelt Snark will keep the wolves at bay (or at least out on the porch). Snark, much like a double scotch, will help you deal with relatives, shopping, and rudeness; it is an outlet for the unleashed vitriolic bile that’s saved itself up over the months. Like a shield, it will protect you while you go about your life. Snark is your answer!

Located in the Cyclades and surrounded by the blue-green water of the Aegean sits whitewashed, windmill-strewn Mykonos, the island of the winds. This ancient island and those surrounding it, mythologized as the bodies of gods felled by Hercules in the time of antiquity, are older legend and have played host to countless cultures for more than millennia. This book chronicles the culture and society that has defined Mykonos as a predominant island utopia over the past century. With such names as 'Paradise' and 'Super Paradise, ' the sands of these shores have captured the imaginations and hearts of industry titans, artists, and party-goers alike from all around the globe, marking it as a stable cosmopolitan destination and as a paramount it haven on the jet-set circuit.

In October 1887 the writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn sailed from New York to Martinique. Intending to stay for a few months, he remained for two years. He viewed French-ruled Martinique as an exotic fusion of European, African and Asian influences, the Creole society par exellence. Describing the island's landscape, its flora and fauna, its colonial architecture and rural villages, he provides a picture of a Caribbean colony where slavery was a recent memory and race an all-importan matter of identity.

Three principles of sustainability, solar energy, chemical cycling, and biodiversity, can guide us in making a shift to a more sustainable society. Five major subthemes - natural capital, natural capital degradation, solutions, trade-offs, and the fact that individuals matter - guide the way to sustainability. This book looks at these subthemes and builds on the knowledge you learn by providing core case studies.

Spear’s reputation as a thought leader is recognized by elite media, publications, and conferences including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Boston Globe, Bloomberg Business Radio, the Shingo Prize, and the Association for Manufacturing Excellence The pioneering insights in Chasing the Rabbit are based on original thinking in the tradition of Jim Collins, C.K. Prahalad, Clayton Christensen, and Michael Porter. Spear is one of the most astute business thinkers and prolific writers to emerge in the recent past; his Harvard Business Review articles are among its most popular reprints. Spear is a four-time Shingo Prize winner and a winner of the McKinsey Award Includes examples from global market leaders including Toyota, Vanguard, Southwest Airlines, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Alcoa

In this classic book, Michael Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in South America. Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, Taussig finds that the fetishization of evil, in the image of the devil, mediates the conflict between precapitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human condition. He links traditional narratives of the devil-pact, in which the soul is bartered for illusory or transitory power, with the way in which production in capitalist economies causes workers to become alienated from the commodities they produce. A new chapter for this anniversary edition features a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille that extends Taussig's ideas about the devil-pact metaphor.

This comprehensive account of the past, present and future of the automobile examines the key trends, key technologies and key players involved in the race to develop clean, environmentally friendly vehicles that are affordable and that do not compromise on safety or design. Undertaking a rigorous interrogation of our global dependency on oil, the author demonstrates just how unwise and unnecessary this is in light of current developments such as the fuel cell revolution and the increasing viability of hybrid cars, which use both petrol and electricity - innovations that could signal a new era of clean, sustainable energy. The arguments put forward draw on support from an eclectic range of sources - including industry insiders, scientists, economists and environmentalists - to make for an enlightening read.

The most comprehensive and authoritative guide to the beautiful islands of Belize, including Ambergris Caye, Caye Caulker and the offshore cayes and atolls. This 200-page guide is by Lan Sluder, author of more than half a dozen books on Belize. It's packed with candid information and photos on hotels, restaurants, tours and activities on the cayes. Bonus 40-page section on living, retiring, working and buying property in Belize.

Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is because we are intimate with devices and machines from an early age -- as children, we play with technological toys: trucks, cars, stoves, telephones, model railroads, Playstations. Through these machines we imagine ourselves into a creative relationship with the world. As adults, we retain this technological playfulness with gadgets and appliances -- Blackberries, cell phones, GPS navigation systems in our cars.We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are making. In Technology Matters, Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. He asks: Can we define technology? Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often fail to get it right?)? How do historians understand it? Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs or create new opportunities? Should "the market" choose our technologies? Do advanced technologies make us more secure, or escalate dangers? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice?These large questions may have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them -- to live them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, "live along some distant day into the answers."

Now in paperback, with a new foreword by Fred Krupp, an expert's illuminating preview of the cleaner, lighter, smarter cars of the future. In Driving the Future, Margo T. Oge portrays a future where clean, intelligent vehicles with lighter frames and alternative power trains will produce zero emissions and run at 100+ mpg. With electronic architectures more like those of airplanes, cars will be smarter and safer, will park themselves, and will network with other vehicles on the road to drive themselves. As the director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, Oge was the chief architect behind the Obama administration’s landmark 2012 deal with automakers in the US market to double the fuel efficiency of their fleets and to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2025. This was America’s first formal climate action using regulation to reduce emissions through innovation in car design. Offering an insider account of the partnership between federal agencies, California, environmental groups, and car manufacturers that led to the historic deal, Margo discusses the science of climate change, the politics of addressing it, and the lessons learned for policy makers. She also takes the reader through the convergence of macro trends that will drive this innovation over the next forty years and be every bit as transformative as those wrought by Karl Benz and Henry Ford. Driving the Future is for anyone who wants to know what car they’ll be driving in ten, twenty, or thirty years—and for everyone concerned about air quality and climate change now.

New York Times Best Seller How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who’s helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial. How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today’s kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn’t shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues—from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.

In 1869, Captain Douglas Owens of the 4th Cavalry is given the orders to reclaim Red River Valley from its murderous outlaw gangs with the help of a former slave and an ex-Rebel gunslinger who join him on one last desperate bid for freedom and justice that changes the course of history. Original.